Astronomers see first supermassive black hole as it's growing up

Scientists are calling a newly discovered black hole the crucial "missing link" between early star-making galaxies and the birth of supermassive black holes.

The finding could help answer a long-held mystery: How did the largest of black holes — millions to billions of times more massive than the sun — get so big so fast?

A black hole is a place in deep space where an enormous amount of dead star material collapses onto itself, densely packing into a tiny area perhaps only a few miles across. Anything that passes too close is liable to get ripped to shreds and swallowed up.

Existing scientific theories suggest supermassive black holes get their start in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are rapidly churned out. From there, black holes might evolve into quasars, extremely luminous objects found in the early universe.

The discovery of this ancient black hole, nicknamed GNz7q by researchers, seems to support that notion.

"GNz7q provides a direct connection between these two rare populations," said Seiji Fujimoto, an astronomer at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, in a statement.

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Fujimoto was the lead author among an international team of astronomers who contributed to a paper on the discovery, published in Nature this month. They found the monstrously-sized object right under their noses. Using Hubble Space Telescope archives, they spotted a curious red dot in the data, smack dab in the center of one of the most thoroughly studied areas in the night sky.

Black holes are some of the most elusive things in outer space. These objects don't have surfaces, like a planet or star, and they function as galactic vacuums, sucking cosmic material into a whirlpool until it reaches a point of no return. The gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong, nothing — not even light — can escape its clutch.

By definition, black holes are invisible, making them exceedingly difficult to study. Prior to GNz7q, astronomers relied on computer simulations to predict the growth of supermassive black holes at the dawn of the universe. But no one had actually observed it happening until now, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

"It shows that big discoveries can often be hidden just in front of you," said Gabriel Brammer, another astronomer from the Niels Bohr Institute, in a statement.

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GNz7q existed when the universe was a mere whippersnapper of 750 million years.That's not old relative to its current estimated age, nearing 14 billion. Its host galaxy is busy birthing stars at a rate 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way.

With Hubble's perch in space, the telescope peers deeper into the cosmos than is possible from the ground. In astronomy, looking farther translates into observing the past because light and other forms of radiation take longer to reach us.

The mixture of radiation coming from GNz7q couldn't be attributed to star formation alone, according to the study. It is, however, consistent with the radiation expected of materials falling into black holes.

GNz7q existed when the universe was a mere whippersnapper of 750 million years.That's not old relative to its current estimated age, nearing 14 billion. Credit: NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (UC Santa Cruz), Pascal Oesch (UC Santa Cruz, Yale), Rychard Bouwens (LEI), I. Labbe (LEI), Cosmic Dawn Center/Niels Bohr Institute/University of Copenhagen, Denmark

That's why the team believes a better explanation is that it is a growing black hole, covered in dust. In time, the researchers suspect the black hole will emerge from its swaddle as a quasar, a beacon of light at the heart of an early galaxy.

So what's the evidence to suggest this phenomenon is a phase in between starburst galaxies and supermassive black holes? In short, GNz7q has some similarities to both — for one, its signature red light from dust — but lacks some features of quasars that come from the ring of gas and dust circling an enormous black hole.

Scientists plan to continue studying the black hole in more detail with the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope and will look for similar targets. Webb, Hubble's successor, will be able to determine how common such rapidly growing black holes are.